Nexus 5X and Pixel Devices Available with New Android O Developer Preview Changes

We all know by now that every new Android release brings a lot of exciting new features. Regarding the upcoming version, it seems that the Android O is not an exception to the rule. Among the features we will find on it, we can count a picture-in-picture mode available for the phones, notification channels, an Autofill Framework feature for password managers, adaptive icons and many others.

Not so obvious changes

The features above are the official confirmed ones, but they represent just a few of all the new additions the tech giant is bringing to their trademark OS. Regular users don’t usually know or pay attention to the more subtle changes that take place with an OS, and naturally, the under-the-hood upgrades are not as visible.

Among the subtle changes you can also count the ones designed for the kernel. People at XDA Developers community have taken a look at the Android O Developer Preview, and they discovered that the OS is now using the SDCardFS, which is the FUSE replacement placed in the kernel in order to emulate the directory permissions belonging to the FAT-on-sdcard type.

The benefits of the SDCardFS have been proven in time for other devices too. Mainly, this change is supposed to cut down the I/O overhead for operations that are carried out on the external storage. Moreover, it should also eliminate the double caching for the page cache and cut out the weird PC file transfer errors, as it happens with the wrong time-stamps placed on your photos.

However, it’s not a surprise that the developers brought the kernel change to the Android O. Fans who were present at the Android Developers Backstage podcast have heard about the change included in the project as being one of the major upgrades.